Marketing emails and Outlook 2007

Many people use GoldMine to send marketing emails but not all may be aware of changes in Outlook that can seriously compromise the look of the results.

It is a statistical inevitability that most of the emails that you send from GoldMine will be viewed in Outlook. Until the 2007 edition, Outlook used to use Internet Explorer as its rendering engine for HTML emails, as GoldMine still does. Now, however, it uses Word instead.

This causes problems, because Word is not particularly good at the job!

In particular, Word is not compliant with modern HTML standards as regards cascading style sheets and table-less layout using DIVs. This means that you must design your templates using tables and in-line style commands to stand any chance of them looking acceptable at the other end.

The list of elements that Outlook can no longer deal with includes:

* no support for background images
* no support for forms
* no support for Flash, or other plugins
* no support for CSS floats
* no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
* no support for CSS positioning
* no support for animated GIFs